Causes

We had a session today about getting parents involved in students' school lives. It opened with a Gallup poll that said that most of the general public blames school failure on parents; they aren't doing enough, aren't encouraging enough, don't care. I never really believed that, probably as a result of my own experiences with many kinds of families. Simply put, with a few rare exceptions, parents care about their children. But I can say confidently that by the end of the first week I was absolutely convinced that it is not the parents who are to blame for student failure- it is the schools. This is not to say that schools aren't up against innumerable challenges. They have budget constraints, endless rules and regulations to follow, and other obstacles. But what I have seen so far in the school where I work this summer, and what I have heard from people working in other schools, confirms that the schools are not at all focused on how well students are doing and what they are learning, but on how well they function as bureaucracies.

An example: The principal wants every student to pass summer school. An admirable goal. Rather than running her school in such a manner as to facilitate students learning the material to earn passing grades, she "unofficially" declares that no student can fail and any student determined to be "in danger of failing" is to be given remediation work until his/her grade has been sufficiently boosted. In the rare event that a student is allowed to be marked as "fail" the grade must be at least a 60% so as not to weight down the schools average.

I was trying to play devil's advocate in this and say that maybe she does this because she doesn't want the school that allows Teach for America (read: rookie) teachers to control its classrooms to look bad. That might endanger the program. And I suppose there could be some element of that. But the truth is, our kids, the ones we teach, failed under the guidance of experienced teachers. If we can guide even a marginal percentage of them towards success, that should be evidence that we're doing something right. I'm not the only one to have heard in my classroom "man, if my regular teacher taught like this I wouldn't be in summer school."